Wilderness is saturated with living and vital things.  And we yearn to be around them.

Every life form imaginable exists in the wild places. Turn over a twig and things move.  Moss grows on trees.  One poet asked another if the moss was “soul.”

Move a piece of bark and life moves in all its mysterious ways.  “Civilized” man slowly separated himself from “the lesser” life forms, including those of his fellow deemed inferior.  He now lives and works in an abstract world - a world of man-made things - a virtual world - a world of non-living mechanical things - a world that excludes Nature.

Half of all wilderness areas in America are within a day's drive of its 30 largest cities.  From the swamps of the Southeast to tundra in Alaska, from snowcapped peaks in the Rocky Mountains to hardwood forests in the Northeast and deserts in the Southwest, wilderness areas are found in all but 6 states (Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, and Rhode Island).  In many states, happily, wilderness areas are growing, so wilderness IS expanding.

Although many wilderness areas remain relatively unvisited, most of the more than 12 million people in America - who use wilderness regularly - visit those closest to their homes.  There appears to be two kinds of “wilderness users:” those who want to conquer nature, and those who want to discover (any number of things) through experiencing it.

What benefits do people get from visiting wildernesses?  A growing number of people are using wilderness to grow a self-concept or a self-identity, or to simply reconnect with living things.  In wilderness, more than any other place, humans can actually feel a part of the whole web of life.  Certainly there's a longing for this in the most hardened city-dweller.

Millions of people are now thinking about the world in totally new ways.  They’re trying to re-create it using what they know through their acquired knowledge and life's experiences.  They yearn to understand the actual nature of the world they live in. 

This, of course, should be taught to each child while in school.  The earlier the better.  Children are not devoid of these thoughts.  Even very young children are intensely curious about the wild things.  But many are literally terrified of these strange things they encounter, such as ants.  We so desperately need to help children overcome these early fears of the wild things.  Too often those fears are acted out in violence against those things we don't understand.  We need to help children feel a part of the natural world, and we're not doing that. 

Teaching them to use a computer is fine.  Teaching them to operate a cell phone or an iPod or an X-Box is all fine, but at the exclusion of a full immersion into nature - is wrong.  Children must be taught to appreciate the greatness of each spring.  They must be allowed to participate in it in some unique way that's currently missing from urban life. 

We keep moving our children farther and farther away from experiencing the natural world.  This produces a feeling of alienation from the very earth we live upon.  Later in life, millions are now heading for the wild places they never got to see and experience as children.

And so wildernesses should be each child’s playground in addition to the one at school.  In this way they can learn how to behave rightly toward other living things.  That it's in their own self-interest to do so.  They can learn to overcome their child-begotten fears and in the process develop a whole new set of values about how to behave toward nature.